


The Lovers That Went Wrong

by thesonder



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath, Angst, Battle of New York (Marvel), Blood, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hurt Natasha Romanov, Injury, Major Character Injury, Post-Avengers (2012), Protective Steve Rogers, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:48:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25897696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesonder/pseuds/thesonder
Summary: In the battle of New York, Natasha takes a hit. Steve is the first to catch her, but his reflexes might not be enough to save Natasha this time, because she is fading, and fast.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 17
Kudos: 89





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by a similar fic I read on ff.net but I can't remember the name.  
> I might continue this and add more chapters but I don't know yet.  
> 

The only person who sees it when it happens is Steve. The battle around them thins, a pause in the onslaught of Chitauri aliens coming at them, and Steve takes the pause to turn and check on Natasha fighting beside him and a little way away. Only instead, he sees her just as she is speared straight through her chest with a long sharp rod in the hand of a lone Chitauri alien.  
The scream is silent as it escapes Steve's mouth and he is forced to watch as the rod in Natasha is wrenched from her body and she crumples to the floor, knees buckling instantly.  
He drops everything and runs.  
Knocking out the one alien that had injured Natasha with one strong punch, Steve dives to the floor underneath where Natasha had fallen and scoops her into his arms immediately.  
Lying half on the debris scattering the New York streets and half on the knees of Steve, Natasha gasps for breath, her mouth open in an expression of shock, but together, her and Steve's gazes fall to the gaping hole just below Natasha's right chest, and to the blood that comes pouring out of it. A fear like nothing on Earth slams Steve's chest as he cradles Natasha's trembling body in his arms.  
He reaches a frantic hand up to his intercom, "Anyone, please! Natasha is hurt, really really bad. Please, help!" His voice chokes up as he speaks, Natasha's grunting in his lap making his heart beat an irregular rhythm against his ribs.  
Almost immediately, Steve hears the roar of Tony's Iron Man suit as it comes rocketing around the corner of a nearby building towards them.  
Tony drops to the ground in a cloud of dust and kneels by Steve and Natasha, looking grimly over her limp form in his arms and the wound seeping blood in her side.  
"Steve, put pressure on it. There. Put your hand over it." he demands, pointing to the open wound.  
Steve obeys, enclosing his hand around the hole, to which Natasha hisses at the contact and bucks up against him. However, Steve holds fast against her writhing, no matter how much it breaks him.  
Tony moves closer to examine the smaller exit wound piercing Natasha's back just as more footsteps come rushing round the corner.  
Clint, Thor and Bruce, now in human form, have arrived on the scene and fall down to join the group formed around their fallen teammate.  
"What the hell happened?" Clint cries.  
"Oh, my God." Bruce whispers in horror down at the blood that soaks Natasha's stealth suit and runs down Steve's hand as he presses it there.  
In Steve's lap, Natasha grunts and moves against the pain steadily paralyzing her. Steve brushes her hair back with his spare hand in a soothing motion, whispering even as his voice breaks.  
"Shh, you're okay. You're gonna be okay."  
Natasha smiles faintly, but then her eyes begin to flutter closed, making Steve's stomach drop.  
"Hey, Nat. Nat, look at me." He touches Natasha's face gently to keep her awake, and Natasha's eyes begrudgingly open again.  
"I am." she protests in a murmur, the effort of speech making her cough weakly.  
Just then, Steve's hand feels unnaturally warm, and when he looks down, he sees that it is now fully coated in Natasha's warm blood, which drips all the way off his wrist.  
In alarm, he looks up Tony.  
"Tony, she won't stop bleeding. There's damage inside, she's needs help! Come on, _do something!"_ he insists desperately. But Tony just sits there frozen, staring down numbly and helplessly at Natasha breathing raggedly in Steve's lap.  
"Steve, if she's hit inside, my suit can't... I can't..." he gulps, and fury and denial wells in Steve.  
"No! You-"  
But then, all of a sudden, in Steve's lap, Natasha's breathing becomes exceedingly more ragged and this time it is accompanied by a wet gurgling at the back of Natasha's throat.  
"Shit, she's bleeding into her lungs. On her side, put her on her side, now!" Tony directs Steve, and together they turn Natasha onto her uninjured side where she continues to gasp for breath, hands scrabbling up at her throat as blood dribbles from her lips.  
"Oh God, she can't breathe. She's choking. Clint, quick, hold her hands back." Tony orders, and Clint catches Natasha's flailing hands in his and pins them down. Steve tilts up Natasha's head as she begins to cough, horrible hacking sounds that tear at his soul. The blood comes in spurts that fill her mouth and come pouring out, coating her chin a deep red. Steve wipes the blood away as best he can, but he can do nothing to stop the blood that fills Natasha's lungs more every passing second.  
After a few more torturous seconds of this, Tony reaches a metal hand around Natasha's back and slams it in an attempt to rid her of the blood pooling in her lungs. Blood sprays from Natasha's lips, hitting both Steve and Tony's suits as it leaves her mouth. Still, she gasps for air, but none comes.  
Natasha can't stop choking, and her face is turning blue, and she's suffocating on her own body, her own blood, and nothing they do stops it.  
"No!" Steve cries desperately as he watches her. "Come _on!_ "  
He can't lose her today, he just can't. He won't lose her today.  
And then, in a sudden stroke of inspiration, Tony wrenches his oxygen-supplying faceplate from his own head and in a last ditch effort, presses it against Natasha's face. The cool metal covers her blueish skin entirely, and after a second of struggled moaning from Natasha, the mask engages and starts releasing pure oxygen into Natasha's broken lungs. From there, what little functioning parts are left will transfer the oxygen to her head. At least this way she won't suffocate, even if the damage to her internal organs is not yet fixed.  
Once Natasha's brain has received the oxygen it needs, the pain begins to overwhelm her again, and she falls limp in Steve's arms. Instantly panicked, he shakes her.  
"Natasha? Natasha! No, wake up! Wake up, come on!"  
"Steve, don't shake her. We need to get her to the Tower." Tony says, glances behind him to see how far they are from it. "They have a medical centre there. An operating room. They can help her. We can get her there, we can do it."  
He chants this almost like a mantra, as if to convince both himself and the others that they can do it. That Natasha does not have to die today.  
"Steve, give her to me. I can fly her up there, it'll be quicker. It won't take a minute."  
"What about your breathing?" Steve gestures to the mask over Natasha's face that Tony usually uses in flight.  
"I can hold my breath. I told you, we're so close, it won't even take a minute."  
Steve nods and hands Natasha's limp form to Tony, who immediately flies into the air with her in his arms, soaring towards the Tower and leaving the rest of the Avengers on the ground.  
Steve leans back on his knees, feeling almost weightless without the pressure of Natasha's body lying on him, and he is left to just stare down at the blood of his love that drips down from his hands, almost as red as her hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What do you think? Should I continue it? Can't decide...


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The much anticipated second chapter!  
> A lot of people asked for this, so I delivered.  
> Wrote this because I had a sucky day today and needed to take out my emotions on something so, sorry Steve :(
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Steve manages to make it back to the Tower in a record breaking two minute sprint. He blasts through the doors, his heart feeling like it’s about to burst out of his chest with the ferocity of its beating. The elevator doors can't close fast enough behind him, and the ride up to the medical floor of Stark Tower is excruciating, Steve feeling like he is about to fall apart each passing second. 

He can't let himself think of the impossible, of Natasha fading before him, because it can't, _can’t,_ happen. It just _can’t_. 

Steve presses the palms of his hands against his eyes as the elevator irises, letting out a choking sob that hurries to escape his throat because panic is rising in him like never before. He can't do it, he can't see her, he can't let this happen but he can't stop it. Helpless, hopeless, heartless. He feels it here.

The doors open and he surfaces his panic with a gasp, bolting out of the doors before they are even fully open and rocketing so fast down the corridors that it feels like his feet are flying beneath him. He skids around a corner and sees the medical wing, a court of chaos surrounding a small figure on an emergency bed lying in a pool of her own blood.

Steve cries out her name, garbled and almost unintelligible as he runs towards the room that he doesn't realise is surrounded by glass until his hand meets it. He presses it there, watching in desperation as a group of doctors fill the small room in manic focus, calling out orders and stats to each other so much and so loud that he can hear it even through the glass. The glass that separates him from her. 

Tony is there in the corner, having delivered Natasha here, standing frozen just like Steve in his Iron Man suit, his body in the suit pressed as close to the glass as possible to make way for the doctors that dart around the room. Steve’s gaze falls back to Natasha lying on the table, the gaping hole in her chest even more visible, if that’s possible - a horrifying, nauseating threat to the life of Steve’s partner, his friend, his love. 

Her eyes are closed, the faceplate of Tony’s suit replaced with an oxygen mask that is now being removed as the doctors prepare for intubation, sliding a larger tube down her throat to carry the oxygen directly down into her torn lungs. Meanwhile, the doctors seem at a loss on how to address the wound in Natasha’s midsection. All they can do is try desperately to stop the bleeding as they attempt to replace it with new blood in a blood bag above her head. Even in the chaos, Steve gets the impression that they have little idea of what they are doing, and pure fear and panic constricts his own chest, making it hard for him to breathe.

His body begs to just reach out to her and touch her, hold her, tell her it will be alright even if she can't hear him. But here he stands on the other side of the glass, his hands clenched into themselves in an old habit of his when he felt unbelievably anxious, hoping and praying to whoever wherever, that he gets to keep her.

Just then, a machine to the left of the bed lets out a whining beep and all eyes in the room travel to it. Where before a number had detailed her live heart rate, there is now just a small dash. A flatline. Her heart has stopped.

The doctors yell and jump into even more action than they had before.

“She’s in asystole!”

“Epi!”

“One shot of epi, now!”

“Starting compressions!”

Steve watches in terror as the doctors flurry around Natasha, working to get her heart beating again. Because it has _stopped_ , and Steve is _losing_ her right now. 

He can see her ribs as they bow under the pressure of the compressions one of the doctors pumps over her heart. They will soon surely break, and this fact almost makes Steve lose it, if he hasn't already. With every compression, the blood comes in small waves out of the wound, no matter how much wadding the doctors fill it with. 

Steve sinks to his knees on the ground outside as he watches, the tears that stream down his face barely registering because today could be the day his world ends. The day his life narrows down to an empty shell caused by the gaping hole in his _own_ chest where Natasha used to be. 

“She’s in V-Fib!”

“Charge to 200!” 

Then the compressions stop, and a bulky machine is dragged over. Paddles, in the hands of a doctor. Her suit pulled away to reveal the top of her chest where large red stickers are placed. 

Then, “Clear!” and all hands fly up, leaving the pair holding the paddles to press down and administer what seems to be a shocking amount of electricity to Natasha’s heart. It nauseates Steve, seeing her body endure this. He wants it to stop, but knows if it does, he will lose her forever. 

Naatsha’s body jerks up as the electricity is administered, but the machine still whines excruciatingly. There are more voices.

“Charge to 300!”

And then they do it again, with an even higher voltage, and Natasha’s body is thrown up to meet the paddles as they shock her heart again. 

A moment of long silence. And then a heartbeat. 

Slow but accelerating, it climbs on the machine and the doctors sigh collectively in relief, before returning hurriedly to addressing her injury. They did it. She is alive. For now.

Every second is a minute, every minute an hour. Too painful to watch, but Steve can’t tear his eyes away.

As soon as they have retrieved Natasha’s heartbeat back again, the doctors pile as many equipment and machines onto the bed as they can and wheel Natasha in her bed out of the door to the left of the room and away from Steve. He tries to chase after them yelling, but before he can even reach them, they have disappeared through a pair of double doors, at the top of which sits a plaque reading ‘OPERATING THEATRE’. 

Surgery. They're taking her into surgery. Steve stands helplessly at the double doors watching her go, the pale grey doors swinging shut behind her.

He doesn't know whether that will be the last time he sees her again.

Drained, in a spiralling, descending pit of worry and dread, Steve moves back to where a small waiting room sits on an aside to the numerous rooms of the medical wing. He collapses into a padded seat, not caring if he stains it with Natasha’s blood. His head falls into his hands, and he finally, finally breaks down. 

After a few minutes of overwhelming crying, he feels Tony sit by him, returning from where he had stood in the room with Natasha, clunking a little in his suit as he lowers himself into a seat. There is a silence, broken only by Steve’s quiet sobs into his hands.

“She’s gonna be okay.” Tony says, almost trying to convince himself as much as Steve. 

“You don’t know that.” Steve says back in a choked voice, muffled from where his face is buried in his hands.

Tony sighs, looking out ahead of him out of the windows of Stark Tower where the battle is being rounded up without them. No, he doesn't know. He has no way of knowing. 

“But we can hope.” 

Steve doesn't answer this, but after a while, he feels Tony’s arm slip around his shoulders, rubbing his arm in a comforting gesture, or as comfortingly as he knows how. 

The two men sit in silence in that room, while the doctors work to fix the internal damage afflicted to Natasha in the battle. Almost an hour later, when the rest of the Avengers arrive at the tower, she is still in surgery.

They rush into the waiting room, Bruce returned to human form, looking around to see Steve and Tony sitting despairingly. Clint’s stomach drops, assuming the worst. When they near the two men, Steve looks up, eyes bloodshot and red, and Clint’s heart sinks further down as his fears seem to be confirmed.

“Is she…?” he says, his voice almost breaking with emotion.

“No, no, she’s… she’s not dead.” Tony assures the group, who all seem to collectively relax, muscles slackening, a couple of them sinking into seats by Steve and Tony. but not all is saved just yet. Just because she hasn't died yet, doesn't mean she can't. 

“She’s in surgery right now… Her… her heart stopped.” Tony says thickly, the memory still painful to him too. 

There are quiet exclamations from the group as they react in horror to the news.

“ _Shit._ ” Clint whispers in concern.

“But she will be okay, right?” Thor asks Tony.

Tony just shrugs helplessly. “We don’t… we dont know. We just have to hope for the best.” 

Thor exhales roughly, hand covering his mouth.

The hours that pass next are excruciating, not only but for Steve but for everyone, all of them who have become Natasha’s friends in this short time. They all care for her, and she is like a little sister to most. 

But to Steve it is more. To Steve _she_ is more.

Tony looks into contacting the operating staff to see Natasha’s condition as the sun dips below the skyscrapers outside in Manhattan, only to find that she just exited surgery, ten minutes ago.

After panicked prompts from Steve, Tony frantically follows up to see how she is, calling the surgeon who had operated on her using a standard mobile phone as they wait in the sitting room. At the sound of a voice on the other end of the line, Steve's head snaps up from where it had previously sat in his hands. 

After a few tense minutes of conversing, Tony hangs up the phone and meets the gaze of everyone in the room looking at him, his expression impassive. The silence is palpable, heavy with the anticipation of Tony’s next words.

“She’s gonna be okay.” he says, and the entire group audibly sighs in relief, raising their eyes to the ceiling in thanks and muttering expressions of elation that Natasha had survived surgery, and this horrible, horrible day. “She’s in recovery. They said you-” Tony nods to Steve. “-can go and see her.” 

Steve immediately jumps to his feet, nodding to Tony and disappearing down the corridor Natasha and the doctors had gone down. A few metres before another set of double doors leading to the operation theatre sits a narrow side door, labelled ‘RECOVERY’. Steve pushes it and it swings open, and he rushes into the room immediately beyond it.

It's large and spacious, with several empty beds, but one of them at the very end sits surrounded by long curtains. Steve reaches the bed in three long strides, yanking away the curtains to see Natasha, just where he had expected to see her, lying peacefully unconscious in a hospital bed.

Steve lets out this weird sob in a mixture of overwhelming relief and sustained fear as well as love for the woman who lies before him. He moves to her, dragging a chair from the corner of the room to sit by the bed, and takes her small, pale hand in his. A small needle exiting from her hand runs a tube up towards more bags of liquid which he is careful to avoid, but other than that, he just holds her hand tight, staring up at her face and somehow seeing beauty in the pain .

Her face is so eerily still that for a moment doubt fills Steve again, and he is forced to look up at the machine next to her to confirm that yes, she is, in fact, still alive, and her heart is still beating in her chest. 

Steve bows his head over the hand he holds against him and the exhaustion from the whole ordeal overwhelms him, and his head comes to rest on her leg covered in the thin hospital sheet.

“I thought I lost you.” he whispers in a choked voice, even though Natasha can’t hear him. It doesn't matter. She doesn't need to know. 

But when Natasha wakes later, groggy from the painkillers and the anaesthetic drugs, the first thing she sees is Steve asleep next to her, her hand clutched fast against him. And she does know. She knows what her death would have cost him, knows how it would have affected him and how lost he would have felt, drifting alone in a world without his other half.

So, with that hand, she squeezes back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't intend on writing anything more for this, but if you have any ideas of something you might want to see happen after this drop it in the comments down below and I'll check it out. For now, this is the work finished.


End file.
